This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below at the end of the specification but prior to the claims.
LTE uses SC-FDMA in the uplink from mobile devices (referred to as user equipment, UEs) to base stations (an example of which is an enhanced Node B, eNB). For more detail regarding UL design in LTE, see “LTE—The UMTS Long Term Evolution: From Theory to Practice”, Sesia et al., editors, Chapter 15, “Uplink Physical Layer Design”, R. Love and V. Nangia, pages 346-358 (2009).
LTE also provides the opportunity to use multiple antennas, e.g., to increase data rate. Originally, such multiple antenna systems were used by individual base stations and UEs to provide improved throughput. Recently, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) systems have begun to use antennas from multiple cells (created by, e.g., remote radio frequency heads), e.g., to receive information in UL from single or multiple UEs. The information from the multiple cells is combined using algorithms such as interference rejection combining (IRC) or maximum ratio combining (MRC) to create an output for each UE. These techniques provide multiple benefits, including increased data rates. However, these techniques could be further improved.